"George Lindemann Captures Frieze" @Cultured_Mag - George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Captures Frieze

 

George with Rob Pruitt whos signing The Last Panda T-Shirt

George with Rob Pruitt, who’s signing The Last Panda T-Shirt

The second edition of Frieze has come and gone, but so long as the tent is still up on Randall’s Island, we’re still enjoying looking back on the art and design filled week, anchored by that fantastic fair.

George Lindemann—a great collector of design and art and President of the Bass Museum’s Board—shares his impressions of Frieze, the inaugural Collective design fair and a few auctions and gallery openings in between.

Gerhard Richter in front of one of his works at Frieze

Gerhard Richter in front of one of his works at Frieze.

Tom Friedman at Luhring Augustine at Frieze

Tom Friedman at Luhring Augustine at Frieze

Jeff Koons at Sothebys

Jeff Koons at Sotheby’s

More Koons at Sothebys

More Koons at Sotheby’s

Kusama chess set

Kusama chess set!

Playwright Edward Albee at the Half Gallery opening

Playwright Edward Albee at the Half Gallery opening

At Collective a desk by Wendell Castle

At Collective, a desk by Wendell Castle

A necklace by Ugo Rondinone

A necklace by Ugo Rondinone

At the opening of Maria Pergays new show at Demisch Danant

At the opening of Maria Pergay’s new show at Demisch Danant

Amy Cappellazzo at Christies with a work by Ruth Asawa

Amy Cappellazzo at Christie’s with a work by Ruth Asawa

Dan Colen at Sothebys

Dan Colen at Sotheby’s

"Anish Kapoor Strikes While Hot" @wsj

Anish Kapoor Strikes While Hot

The English sculptor on today's art boom and tilting his Berlin retrospective toward the future

Mumbai-born sculptorAnish Kapoor—the man behind the beloved bean-shaped "Cloud Gate" sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park—wants everyone to know that his abstract art has no inherent meaning, and he has nothing to say about it.

Anish Kapoor/VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013

'Symphony for a Beloved Sun' (2013)

"What we call 'abstract art' plays a game with you. There is a dialogue between you and a thing," the 59-year-old artist said this week while scrambling to install around 45 works for one of his largest exhibitions ever, which opens in Berlin today. "There isn't a meaning, but you come to a meaning. If I had something to say it would get in the way all the time."

Mr. Kapoor's show, which runs through Nov. 24 at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau museum, features works dating from 1988 to the present. They're made from a range of materials including wax, stone and pigment powder. He included many new pieces, he said, to balance the show's retrospective quality. "You can tell the difference between something that is pushing toward some kind of inner process and something that is trotted out," said Mr. Kapoor, who lives in London.

His often large, striking pieces are well known for their technical precision and their creator's ability to hint at subjects such as violence without ever explicitly confronting them. In "Shooting Into the Corner," a work that has toured London, Vienna and Mumbai and appears again in Berlin, he and his assistants shot large pellets of blood-red wax from a miniature cannon into a museum corner.

A multiwork installation at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau

Mr. Kapoor concedes that the museum's location exerted a major influence on his selection process. He says he chose a fair number of pieces that address violence. "My God, we've got that museum of death right next door," he says, referring to the Topography of Terror Museum, which sits on the former Gestapo and Nazi SS headquarters. "You can hardly do something in this building and not be aware of the weight of those histories." The highlight of the exhibition is his new work, "Symphony for a Beloved Sun." A 30-foot-wide red circle is supported by stilts and surrounded by conveyor belts that drop blocks of red wax onto the floor with a resounding thud.

Born in 1954 to a Jewish mother and Hindu father, Mr. Kapoor emigrated to London in 1973 and won the Turner Prize in 1991 for an untitled set of tan blocks of sandstone that had attracted the interest of art critics. But it was his colorful sculptures that first made him popular with the general public.

Such a piece is "Wound," a fire-engine-red pigment work in the Berlin show. Two stones, their interiors carved out and coated with red powder, flank a sliver of red pigment. The red crawls up the wall and protrudes into the room, seemingly suspended in the air. Another piece on display, "Blood Mirror IV," is a massive, concave aluminum dish. The 2013 work has a playful feel that is at odds with its sinister title. From a distance, it appears to be flat. Yet as one walks closer, it becomes evident that the sides of the dish curve and seem to exert a pressure on the viewer's ears.

It's a feeling "not unlike when you're descending in an airplane and your ears want to pop," says Alex Branczik, a senior director in Sotheby's BID +2.77%contemporary-art department, which has sold four of Mr. Kapoor's top five works at auction. Christie's sold a red dish similar to "Blood Mirror IV" in 2008 for $2.14 million.

Mr. Kapoor's most expensive works remain the metal dishes and stone "void" carvings—luminescent sculptures made of alabaster and with holes, concavities or windows hand-chiseled into them that are also featured in the Berlin show. Sotheby's sold an untitled alabaster sculpture in 2008 for $3.9 million, his most expensive work ever auctioned.

Both types of works are highly recognizable and trade fairly regularly at auction, a strategy by collectors known as "flipping" that many artists find insulting. Mr. Kapoor remains serene about both his branding and auction sales, saying that wild speculation in contemporary art is an inevitable result of the continuing economic crisis.

"It's as hot as can be," he says of the current art market, which saw Christie's pull in the highest total in auction history Wednesday night in New York, where it sold $495 million in postwar and contemporary art. "If in art we can find meaning and value, it's got to be a good thing."

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 16, 2013, on page D8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Anish Kapoor Strikes While Hot.

"Christie's opens survey exhibition dedicated to American artist Ruth Asawa"

Ruth Asawa and Wire Sculpture and Shadows. Photo: Imogen Cunningham.
 
 
NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s presents a survey exhibition dedicated to one of America's most talented artists of the 20th century, Ruth Asawa. Objects & Apparitions is Asawa’s first major solo show in New York in over 50 years. This curated exhibition will feature an extraordinary grouping of approximately 50 works including sculpture and works on paper — for private sale or on loan— and will afford a rare and comprehensive view of the artist’s body of work. This exceptional three-week exhibition will take place on the 20th floor of 1230 Avenue of the Americas, at Rockefeller Center in May 2013. The exhibition coincides with the New York Post-War and Contemporary Art auctions in May of this year, and will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, with original texts by poet and art critic, John Yau, and Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. At the May 15th evening sale auction, Christie’s will offer a major sculpture from the Ruth Asawa Family Collection.

“It is an honor to present this survey of amazing and singular works by Ruth Asawa. The exhibition will trace Asawa’s artistic journey from her works on paper, created while studying with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, to her career as a pioneering modernist sculptor currently gaining international recognition. The large scope and stature of Asawa’s work will come into vivid focus in this exhibition that I had the pleasure of assembling with the assistance and guidance of Asawa’s incredible family. We are privileged to be able to present thirty-four sculptures and fourteen works on paper, with additional documentary source materials including vintage photographs of the artist and her work taken by the renowned photographer Imogen Cunningham. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City in over fifty years and Christie’s is pleased to be able to host this incredible event” stated Jonathan Laib, Christie’s, Senior Specialist, Post-War & Contemporary Art, curator of the exhibition.

On a journey to Mexico in the summer of 1947, Asawa was captivated by the looped wire baskets used in markets to sell eggs and other produce. Intrigued with wire as an exploratory medium for her own studies, she began to loop and twist wire in a similar fashion. Asawa began creating threedimensional forms that played with their surrounding space using one continuous line made of wire. These looped wire sculptures with their multi-layered exterior and interior forms invoke a sense of wonder that immediately turns to a curiosity about how they were made. These sculptures rely on the language of transparency that is associated with the formulation of modernism and design
promoted by the Bauhaus.

Asawa's looped wire forms were often executed in her home, with her six children surrounding her, creating a poetic narrative in which life intertwines with art. The maternal character of Asawa’s art recalls the organic forms of another important 20th century female artist, Louise Bourgeois, whose oversized outdoor bronze spider sculptures possess a similar sense of labored domesticity. Both artists touch on the notion of a mother figure weaving and threading her way through art and life as a means of reflecting upon personal experience. Similarly, Asawa's process and rhythmic wire loops bring to mind the early “Infinity Nets” created concurrently by Yayoi Kusama in the 1950s and 1960s. Though Kusama's nets were primarily graphic works on canvas, her paintings, like Asawa's looped wire sculptures, were created through the infinite repetition of a single calligraphic motion. Like Yayoi Kusama, Ruth Asawa creates mystery and profundity through deceptively simple means while giving form to the ineffable.

If Asawa became a groundbreaking modernist sculptor of abstract forms, she was first an extremely talented painter. The exhibit will present a series of works on paper from her time studying at the famed Black Mountain College and additional works created during her residency at the legendary Tamarind Institute. These works feature variations and meanders, bird and chevron motifs, and overlapping forms, creating multiple optical illusions, a vocabulary inspired by her studies with Josef Albers.

Evening sale Post-War and Contemporary Art - May 15, 2013
A major work from the Ruth Asawa Family Collection will be offered at auction on May 15. Estimated at $250,000-350,000, Untitled (S.108, hanging, six lobed, multi-layered continuous form within a form) — illustrated on page 2 — is one of the artist's largest and most intricate sculptures, incorporating her best-known form-within-a-form motif. With a length of 137 inches, Untitled (S.108) exists essentially as a drawing in space, an intertwining network of brass and copper wire. It was exhibited in the American Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair.

Ruth Asawa has lived a rare and unique life as an artist. Her life, like her art, has been shaped by social and political impositions, unjust restrictions on her liberties and supposed inalienable rights. As a teenager in the early 1940's, Asawa and her family were sent by Executive Order to an internment camp along with approximately 120,000 fellow Japanese-Americans. Under the tutelage of professional artists who were also held captive in the camps, Asawa began exercising freedom through her art while the government stripped her of her civil liberties. Despite the suffering she endured. Asawa exhibited great humility and harbored little resentment more than fifty years after the event, saying, "I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am."

By 1946, Asawa had been recruited by fellow student Ray Johnson to attend Black Mountain College where, for the next three years she was mentored by such visionaries, as Josef and Anni Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller. From the teachings of these legendary artists, Asawa absorbed fundamental lessons that instilled a “less is more” approach to art making. Asawa gained prominence with her wire sculptures in the 1950s. Her work appeared several times in the annual exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in the 1955 São Paulo Art Biennial, but also in solo and group shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Oakland Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. She had major solo retrospective exhibits at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1973), the Fresno Art Center (1978 and 2001), the Oakland Museum (2002), the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum (2006), and the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, 2007). Her work can be found in major collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She has received numerous awards including the Fine Arts Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects and the Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts from the Women’s Caucus for Art. In 1982, February 12th was declared Ruth Asawa Day in San Francisco. The same year she was the driving force behind the creation of the public high school for the arts, which is now the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts.

"Sussman Videos Offer Dark View of Modern Life" @bassmuseum

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award - George Lindemann

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award

March 26, 2013

georgelindemann-for-website
Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce has awarded George Lindemann the award of Citizen at Large at the inaugural Better Beach Awards. This award was given to Lindemann based on his for his prolific and impactful role in growing, branding and leading the Bass Museum of Art for the past 5 years. As the President of the Board of Directors of the Bass Museum of Art, George Lindemann has not only been one of the few original members of the Board of Directors, but helped grow the board from 3 members to the current 23 current members of the Board creating a diverse and dynamic group of leaders for the Bass Museum of Art. Lindemann also helped conceptualize the current mission statement of the Bass Museum of Art, “we inspire and educate by exploring the connections between our historical collections and contemporary art”.
Along with the City of Miami Beach, George Lindemann’s generous donations and commitment to education, he created the Lindemann Family Creativity Center at the Bass Museum of Art. The Lindemann Family Creativity Center is the home of the museum’s IDEA@thebass program of art classes and workshops. Developed in conjunction with Stanford University’s acclaimed Institute of Design, IDEA classes employ a method of teaching known as Design Thinking, an open-ended method of problem-solving that allows children to brainstorm, work in teams and engage in creative play. The Creativity Center is also the home of the Art Club for Adults, lectures, film screenings, and teacher training workshops. Additional programming includespre-school art classes, after school and weekend art classes (children ages 6 to 12), and experimental programming designed by the museum’s Stanford Fellow and other experts in the field of arts education.

Congratulations, George Lindemann!

"Women on the Verge" @wsj - The George Lindemann Journal

By ELLEN GAMERMAN and MARY M. LANE

A lady in a bonnet is shaking up the art world.

When "After Lunch," Berthe Morisot's portrait of a doe-eyed woman, sold for $10.9 million in February, it set a record as the most expensive work ever sold by a female artist at auction. It also helped power a wave of interest among collectors and dealers looking to identify undervalued female artists.

SB10001424127887323309604578430932517007190Yayoi Kusama/David Zwirner, Victoria Miro Gallery, Ota Fine Arts, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

YAYOI KUSAMA: The 84-year-old is the top-selling living female artist of all time, fetching $118 million total at auction.

A woman's signature in the bottom corner of a painting has long spelled a bargain—men in the same artistic school or period can fetch more than 10 times the price of a woman's best sale. While an age-old debate rages over whether talent, sexism or lack of promotion has held many women out of the art world's boys club, everyone agrees that prices for female artists have always lagged behind those of their male counterparts.

Today's flourishing art market—marked by last year's record-setting sale at auction of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for nearly $120 million—has lifted prices for male and female artists alike. As the supply of great pictures diminishes, more collectors are priced out of blue-chip works and are combing the market for previously overlooked names. A number of highly regarded women artists are seeing their prices rise as a result.

"Remember 'plastics' from 'The Graduate'? It should be 'women,' " says Tony Podesta, the Washington lobbyist who is one of a handful of collectors aggressively buying work by women artists.

This winter, a painting by Berthe Morisot sold for $11 million--the most ever paid for a woman's artwork at auction. Along with other big art-market moments for women in recent years, the record has auction houses and dealers re-examining this historically undervalued niche. Ellen Gamerman reports.

The records are toppling. Nine of the top 10 auction sales of work by women occurred within the last five years. The last two years marked record-high prices at auction for artists including Joan Mitchell, Tamara de Lempicka, Louise Bourgeois, Irma Stern, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Helen Frankenthaler, Rosemarie Trockel and Louise Lawler.

Auction experts and collectors are anxious to see how three Morisot paintings will sell next month during Impressionist and modern sales in New York, two at Sotheby's BID +2.20%and one at Christie's.

"Whereas before we looked at female artists as the land of opportunity, with prices like these, collectors say the window is closing for gender-specificity bargain buying," says Gabriela Palmieri, a senior vice president and contemporary-art specialist at Sotheby's.

imageCindy Sherman/Metro Pictures

CINDY SHERMAN: In 2011, the artist was the auction world's highest-priced photographer, male or female, with a $3.9 million sale. Here, the artist models in an untitled portrait.

Spanning centuries and a wide variety of styles, work by women is hardly a cohesive market category. Still, some collectors eagerly seek out female artwork.

Prominent women like Wal-Mart WMT +1.47%heiress Alice Walton, pop queen Madonna and songstress Barbra Streisand have long collected work by women. Barbara Lee, a national activist for women in politics, has filled her collection almost entirely with work by women partly to support artists she believes are underrepresented by museums and galleries. She recalled visiting Louise Bourgeois's studio in the early 1990s. "It was filled with sculpture from every period of her life—no one had purchased it," says Ms. Lee.

Others have less-altruistic motives. "A lot of collectors look for undervalued groups of art, and women could easily be considered the last big group," says Michel Witmer, a New York collector and board member of the European Fine Art Fair.

Dealers and auction experts are using several tactics as they scour the market. One is to find female artists whose works, backgrounds or artistic movements mirror those of prohibitively expensive male artists. These artists include: Joan Mitchell, who worked in the shadows of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock; Natalia Goncharova, one of the turn-of-the-century Russian artists led by Wassily Kandinsky; and Agnes Martin, who forged a path in a male-dominated period led by minimalists like Donald Judd.

Others track female artists whose works have hovered just under $1 million at auction, expecting them to pop into seven figures. Among those attracting attention: conceptual artist Sherrie Levine, known for appropriating photographs by artists like Edward Weston and Walker Evans; and Barbara Kruger, who plasters black-and-white photographs with loud slogans. Both their prices have been dwarfed by the multimillion-dollar sums fetched by fellow contemporary artists like Richard Prince or Christopher Wool.

Another contender: Helen Frankenthaler. There's some debate over the merits of the late abstract expressionist's work compared with those of the men who came before her—like Pollock, whose biggest auction sale topped $40 million—but collectors have shown they're ready to bet on her. Frankenthaler's auction record is just under $1 million, but her early work was recently featured in a show at New York's Gagosian Gallery, where a canvas sold privately for $3 million, according to a gallery official.

The evolution in the market for Joan Mitchell's work illustrates how collectors have recently "discovered" an artist long in the shadows of her male counterparts.

Mitchell, the late Chicago-born painter known for splattering strokes and bold colors, operated just outside circles of older abstract-expressionist peers like de Kooning and Pollock. In 1951, she exhibited alongside them in New York, but by the 1960s she had exiled herself to France.

In 2006, as the art market boomed, a 1970s de Kooning sold for $27 million at Christie's. A Mitchell work fetched $2 million, a big sum for the artist at the time, but one that suddenly had the whiff of a good deal in the Christie's salesroom. New York art adviser Abigail Asher remembers the scene: "A client turned to me and said, 'Wow, doesn't that seem inexpensive?' " she recalled of the collector, who had just bought a Mitchell privately earlier that week.

By 2011, Mitchell's market had climbed as hedge-fund managers and other trophy hunters pegged her work as a good investment. Ms. Asher recalled chasing a Mitchell canvas past its $6 million high estimate against another bidder at Sotheby's. The piece, a large-scale canvas in a riot of colors, sold for $9.3 million—her highest sum ever at auction. Ms. Asher, who lost out, slumped in her seat after the hammer fell: "It was the feeling of: 'The cat's out of the bag.' "

Last year, Mitchell's canvases were the two most expensive works by any woman artist sold at auction, according to auction database Artnet. Her work now hangs in museums around the world, including Ms. Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. A 1958 Mitchell painting will be on the block next month at Christie's.

A number of theories exist for why women have languished in the art world's bargain basement. Experts point to the smaller supply of work by women from certain periods—after all they're called Old Masters, not Old Mistresses—which limits the frequency of sales and holds down prices. Women also are underrepresented by major museums, where purchases and exhibits boost prices. Famous artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo do appear in museum shows, but the permanent modern art collections of most major institutions are comprised largely of work by male artists.

Others say women haven't marketed themselves as well as men. "Male artists are much more pushy and power-related," says Eva Presenhuber, a Zurich-based dealer who noted she recently threw a toned-down party for the artist Karen Kilimnik because the artist doesn't like to promote herself with splashy events.

Indeed, the upper echelons of the art world still belong to men: All of the top 100 works ever sold at auction were created by male artists, and fewer than 3% of auctioned works over $1 million last year were by female artists, according to Artnet. No living woman has cleared $10 million at auction to date, compared with scores of men.

One reason Morisot took off, experts say, is because she and artists like Mary Cassatt have styles similar to those of famous male painters of the period, in this case Manet and Renoir. They also have recognizable brand looks that are easy to live with. "It's no coincidence that the art you see reproduced in doctors' waiting rooms is [their] type of Impressionist work," says Philip Hook, a senior specialist in Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department.

Morisot and Cassatt were prolific artists, but most of their work is ferreted away in museums, making those paintings that do crop up on the market highly sought-after.

In a packed Christie's salesroom in London last February, the Morisot canvas, "After Lunch," sold for roughly three times its high estimate after a protracted back-and-forth between two telephone bidders from Russia and the U.S. The piece is believed to have gone to an American.

The market prizes other female artists because of artistic styles and cultural sensibilities that translate well over time. Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish-born artist with a booze-and-party-fueled lifestyle, moved to Hollywood in 1939 and became a wild fixture on the movie-industry scene. Her Art Deco paintings, brimming with men in tuxes, busty blondes and lesbian trysts, draw famous admirers today—and have reached record auction prices in recent years. Sotheby's will feature a moody Manhattan skyline by the artist during next month's sales.

Madonna, who owns at least two de Lempickas, has collected her for decades and considers her work a source of inspiration, a spokeswoman confirmed. When the singer's "Vogue" video came out in 1990, featuring Madonna's de Lempickas in the background, it sent a frisson through auction houses and art galleries. For years later, whenever anyone had a de Lempicka to sell, the reaction was always the same: "Everyone said, 'Oh, offer it to Madonna,' " says David Norman, Sotheby's co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art world-wide.

Other avid collectors include Barbra Streisand, who was first drawn to the artist's paintings in the 1970s when she was building a house in Art Deco style. "I found Lempicka's work to be so original," Ms. Streisand said in an email, praising the artist's style and technique. "The fact that she was a woman artist made her even more intriguing."

The gender gap narrows within smaller niche markets like photography. Cindy Sherman, a 59-year-old chameleon who spends years planning portraits of herself in various personae, briefly held the title as the auction world's highest-priced photographer, female or male, in 2011. An image of herself splayed across a brown linoleum floor sold for $3.9 million. Ms. Sherman's works, which sold for $1,000 at her long-standing gallery Metro Pictures in 1981, now typically fetch $450,000 at the gallery and are collected by art-market heavyweights such as Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and Christie's owner François Pinault.

An older generation of women artists sees a much different art market today than the one they grew up with. Pat Steir, a 74-year-old New York artist who pours paint down her monumental canvases, recalled one summer in 1964 visiting a friend whose father was an abstract painter. One of his guests was Mark Rothko. Ms. Steir approached him, explaining that she had just gotten out of art school. "I said, 'Mr. Rothko, you're such a great artist, I admire your work so much,' and he said, 'You're a pretty girl. Why aren't you married?' "

Ms. Steir's art now hangs in most major museums across the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Partner Without the Prize" @nytimes - George Lindemann

Partner Without the Prize

 

By ROBIN POGREBIN

 

Twenty-two years after being passed by, the architect Denise Scott Brown, 81, said at an awards ceremony for women in architecture last month that it was time she share in the 1991 Pritzker Prize that was given to her design partner and husband, Robert Venturi, with whom she had worked side by side.

 

Arielle Assouline-Lichten, foreground, and Caroline James started the Pritzker petition.

“They owe me not a Pritzker Prize but a Pritzker inclusion ceremony,” Ms. Scott Brown said. “Let’s salute the notion of joint creativity.”

Her remarks prompted two students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design to start an online petition demanding that the panel that administers architecture’s highest prize revisit that decision.

The petition has now drawn 9,000 signatures, many of them from the world’s most famous architects, including six prior Pritzker winners. And it has reignited long-simmering tensions in the architectural world over whether women have been consistently denied the standing they deserve in a field whose most prestigious award was not given to a woman until 2004, when Zaha Hadid won.

“The progress of recognizing the place and the contribution of women in architecture has been incredibly slow,” said Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. “It’s been thought to be boys’ stuff.”

The prize organization has long defended its exclusion of Ms. Scott Brown on the ground that back then it honored only individual architects, a practice that changed in 2001 with the selection of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. They are among the architects who have signed the petition, along with fellow Pritzker winners Richard Meier, Ms. Hadid, Wang Shu and Rem Koolhaas, who called the exclusion of Ms. Scott Brown “an embarrassing injustice which it would be great to undo.”

Mr. Venturi, 87, also signed the petition, but Ms. Scott Brown said he was not well and unable to comment. When he won in 1991, she did not attend the award ceremony in protest.

The Pritzker winner is chosen annually by a panel of a half-dozen or so independent jurors. There was one woman on the panel in 1991 and there is one woman on the panel today, Martha Thorne, the Pritzker’s executive director.

“Jurors change over the years, so this presents us with an unusual situation,” Ms. Thorne said of the inclusion request. “The most that I can say at this point is that I will refer this important matter to the current jury at their next meeting.”

The ceremony for this year’s Pritzker winner, Toyo Ito, is to be May 29 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The $100,000 prize, financed by the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, has been awarded since 1979.

While about half of architecture students in the United States are women, only a quarter of employees of architecture firms across the country are female, according to 2011 data from the American Institute of Architects. The number is smaller — 17 percent — when counting principals or partners in architecture firms.

Design professionals cite many reasons, including the sense that architecture involves business and construction, which have both been traditionally considered the province of men. And still persistent is the mythology of the architect as a solo male genius — the Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “Fountainhead.”

“It’s embedded and the Pritzker Prizes embed it,” said Beverly Willis, an architect who founded the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, which supports women in architecture. “They’re totally outdated, they’re totally passé and if they continue trying to isolate the Howard Roark man, they’re totally irrelevant.”

Ms. Scott Brown is one of the rare female architects to have achieved prominence.

“Denise Scott Brown is sort of like architecture’s grandmother,” said Arielle Assouline-Lichten, a Harvard design student who started the petition with Caroline James. “Almost all architecture students have studied her in school. Everyone grew up with her as the female professional who’s always been around and never really gets the recognition.”

Ms. Scott Brown, who was born in Zambia, met Mr. Venturi in 1960 at the University of Pennsylvania, where they were on the faculty and began working together. They married in 1967. She joined his firm that same year.

“Some people said, ‘She married the boss and thought she could get ahead,’ “ Ms. Scott Brown said in a telephone interview from her home in Philadelphia. “But if anyone was the boss, I was. We really were colleagues and we taught together. It was a very, very wonderful collaboration for both of us.”

Since 1960, she and Mr. Venturi have teamed up on buildings like the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London and Franklin Court, a museum and memorial to Benjamin Franklin in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. They have run a practice together — Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates in Philadelphia, now VSBA — written books together, taught classes together and jointly developed groundbreaking theories about architecture and planning.

“You can’t separate them,” Mr. Bergdoll said. “It’s one of those great partnerships.”

The couple is known in large part for upending Modernism by embracing the vernacular of neon signs and kitsch as legitimate design. Their work with a class of Yale architecture students in Las Vegas in 1968 — examining casinos, parking lots and fast-food restaurants — resulted in their 1972 book, “Learning From Las Vegas” (written with Steven Izenour), which became an influential design treatise and helped usher in the period known as postmodernism.

Ms. Scott Brown said she was moved by the recent outpouring of support. “There needs to be some kind of corrective action,” she said. “Let’s not say corrective — let’s say inclusive.”

Several design school deans have signed, including Mohsen Mostafavi at Harvard, Sarah Whiting at Rice and Jennifer Wolch at the University of California at Berkeley.

“The initiative on the part of the students is something that I really value,” Mr. Mostafavi said. “I hope they will be this proactive when it comes to their own futures.”

Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of Yale’s Architecture School, said he declined to sign the petition because he objected to its use of the word “demand,” but that he backed it in principle. “It would be wonderful for the Pritzker committee to review the situation and to offer her the prize,” Mr. Stern said. “The nature of the collaboration was so intense on every level.”

Architects say the Pritzker is unlikely to reverse its decision, in part because several members of the jury at that time are no longer living, including Ada Louise Huxtable, J. Carter Brown and Giovanni Agnelli.

The Web site ArchDaily on April 1 posited the counterargument that Mr. Venturi was awarded the Pritzker based on projects completed before Ms. Scott Brown joined the firm, like the Vanna Venturi House (1964). Yet the award citation directly acknowledged Ms. Scott Brown’s contributions.

“His understanding of the urban context of architecture, complemented by his talented partner, Denise Scott Brown, with whom he has collaborated on both more writings and built works, has resulted in changing the course of architecture in this century,” the citation said, “allowing architects and consumers the freedom to accept inconsistencies in form and pattern, to enjoy popular taste.”

For Ms. Scott Brown, the sting remains fresh. “When we married I suddenly was being told, “Look, let’s just keep this photograph of architects,’ ” she recalled. “I’d say, ‘I am an architect and they’d say, ‘Would you mind moving out of the picture, please?’ “

"Coastal cities ponder how to prepare for rising sea levels" @miamiherald

   A lone person walks the water line in Long Beach Mississippi

By Erika Bolstad

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- Americans in coastal areas, particularly on the East and Gulf coasts, will confront challenging questions in the coming years as they determine how to protect millions of people in the face of rising sea levels and more intense storms.

Should cities rebuild the boardwalks in New Jersey shore towns? Should the government discourage people from rebuilding in areas now more vulnerable to flooding? How much would it cost to protect water and sewer systems and subways and electrical substations from being inundated in the next storm?

Leaders from coastal communities along the East Coast gathered in New York City on Wednesday to talk about the consequences of Hurricane Sandy, as well as how they’ll address future sea level rising. The conference was sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit, nonpartisan science advocacy group.

"What we really got a glimpse at was our collective future," said Joe Vietri, who heads coastal and storm risk management for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and is heading up a comprehensive study of Sandy.

Rising sea levels caused primarily by global warming could worsen the effects of storms such as Sandy, particularly when it comes to storm surge. Since 1992, satellites have observed a 2.25-inch rise in global sea levels.

Just before Sandy, sea surface temperatures were about 5 degrees Fahrenheit above the 30-year average for the time of year. Scientists who studied the storm determined that about 1 degree was likely a direct result of global warming.

With every degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 4 percent more moisture. As a result, Sandy was able to pull in more moisture, fueling a stronger storm and magnifying the amount of rainfall by as much as 5 percent to 10 percent compared with conditions more than 40 years ago.

Coupled with higher overall sea levels, the intense storm meant more water surging onshore and penetrating farther inland. The storm’s effects prompted officials in Wilmington, N.C., to look at its vulnerabilities if seas rise up to one meter by the end of the century.

"People are listening, people are ready to take some actions," said Phil Prete, a senior environmental planner for the city.

The officials spent less time discussing the cause of rapid sea level rise: how to slow the carbon emissions that are heating up the Earth and warming the oceans. Many public officials in coastal communities instead are focusing on what they say are the consequences of global warming.

They have no choice, said Kristin Jacobs, mayor of Broward County, Fla., where extreme tides during Hurricane Sandy washed out portions of Fort Lauderdale’s iconic beachfront highway.

"Almost all of us are living in very low-lying areas," she said. "There are many lessons in South Florida already learned from multiple hurricanes. We have learned from those hurricanes, we have learned to plan for the future, and we’ve learned that this is our new normal."

The causes are also a settled question in Hoboken, N.J., where an estimated 500 million gallons of Hudson River water inundated the town and stayed for nearly 10 days, said Stephen Marks, Hoboken’s assistant business administrator. He called on the federal government and states to take a leadership role in addressing climate change, particularly in communities that are vulnerable to its effects.

"The debate about climate change is essentially over," Marks said. "Hurricane Sandy settled that for, I would say, a majority of the residents in our city."

But coastal populations are particularly vulnerable, and growing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month issued a report showing that already crowded U.S. coastal areas will see population grow from 123 million people in 2010 to nearly 134 million people by 2020. That puts millions more people at risk from storms such as Sandy.

People may be aware of the consequences of climate change, but it hasn’t seemed to have stopped anyone from moving to the beach – or hurt property values, said Vietri, of the Army Corps of Engineers. He noted that communities suffered far less damage if there were sand dunes or other protective measures, such as substantial setbacks for homes.

"You still have communities rebuilding almost exactly where they were prior to the storm coming," Vietri said. "You continue to have a situation where we have a tremendous population density living in high-hazard areas."

"I Refuse to Classify": Mattia Bonetti on Blurring Boundaries in Design

 

Mattia Bonetti/© Billy Farrell/BFAnyc.com/Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

Cleverly installed over astroturf rugs inside Paul Kasmin GalleryMattia Bonetti’s new collection of high-design furniture is meant to transition seamlessly from living room to garden. The Swiss-born, Paris-based designer is known for his irreverent, eye-grabbing, and — often — dazzlingly shiny functional objects. Titled “Indoor/Outdoor,” the exhibition showcases Bonetti’s ecumenical rage of styles, from a spartan contemporary take on the klismos (an ancient Greek chair) to a neo-baroque cabinet tricked out with gold-plated bronze baubles. Highlights include a table made from shimmering rock crystal, a wicker dining set cast in bronze, a table with legs that imitate the undulations of a pearl necklace, and a monolithic travertine bench fit for a giant.

 

The Swiss-born designer talked to ARTINFO about how he conceived the objects in the new show.

 What inspired your foray into outdoor furniture?

 

The idea was to bring the outdoor into the indoor, and to bring the indoor into the outdoors: to blur the lines. I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to bring a garden chair into the home, or a settee outside. But I do like the idea of blending the two. I’ve been working on pieces that are originally made of wicker. They are cast bronze from a wicker model. Wicker by definition is associated with the outdoors, although in the 19th century it was very much fashionable to have wicker indoors as well.

 

Do you mix indoor and outdoor furniture in your home?

 

I do not because I live in an apartment. The only thing I can do is open the window and feel the air.

 

Was it your idea to install the AstroTurf in the gallery?

 

I wanted it that way because I think it explains the concept, because we have grass but we are indoors. Also, outdoor doesn’t mean necessarily in the middle of the forest. It can be a covered terrace or a balcony, or some sort of building in a garden, there are all of these indoor/outdoor spaces.

 

You call your works functional sculptures. Where do you see it falling between art and design?

 

To be frank and honest, all my works are to be used as furniture. On top of that, they may have an aspect that’s more sculptural than what you find on the market. Because once the function is answered, you can do whatever you want. You don’t need to be Bauhaus or minimalistic, although you can.

 

Do you have a favorite piece in the show?

 

I do like the [travertine] couch a lot because of its mass. It was carved from a block. It was very difficult to produce. Also, the little table made with rock crystal: I like it very much.

 

You like to play with organic and geometric forms. The rectilinear and modernist “Metals Coffee Table” couldn’t be further from almost-rococo curvature of “Rocky Side Table.” What interests you about refusing to adhere to a consistent style? 

 

I’m always divided between the two. Because I like both. I can’t make a decision and I don’t want to make a decision. I’m always very mixed up. Business-wise, it’s better when people systematically repeat one thing. It becomes a brand. It’s immediately recognizable. Whereas, I change very often. From one show to the next, things are very different.

 

The [Liquid Gold] cabinet combines the two [aesthetics], I would say, because it’s quite straight in line, but you have all these ripplings that are more informal. They could be called Baroque, with their guiding and the richness.

 

There are certain motifs that you do bring back, such as your table with the pearl legs or the dice motif.

 

Yes, I’ve done that before and then we decided to make it in a smaller size. I’ve done two dice pieces for a client in Hong Kong many years ago, but they were made of wood. We always liked it, so we said, why don’t we make one in metal that can go indoors or outdoors.

 

What appeals to you about the dice motif?

 

I think it’s very surrealistic. My work sometimes is also on the verge of surrealism. 

 

What designers influence you?

 

I quite like the design of the second part of the 19th century, the Aesthetic Movement. It’s very decadent but at the same time also on the verge of something very modernistic — and you can feel that. And I think it's very interesting when you have those moments of passage. Because you had people like Christopher Dresser, for example, who was so advanced. I like [Edward William] Godwin and that kind of thing.

 

Your work has been deemed “neo-baroque,” “neo-barbarian,” and “postmodern.” How would you classify yourself?

 

I don’t. I refuse to classify, but everything is ok.

 

What are you working on next?

 

I’m planning to have a show with my English gallery [London’s David Gill Gallery] in one year’s time. I’ve also been asked to do a couple of objects for Christian Dior’s shops, objects that will not be sold. They will be there to evoke. The first one is in Paris on the Avenue Montagne. They have an apartment that’s been installed as if it were Christian Dior’s original place. I think that some of the items did belong to him originally. They asked me to do a mirror, so I did a very surrealist mirror inspired by Dior imagery. I used the Dior ribbon in a new way and I made a hand that comes from the back of the mirror and goes through it — very surrealist. It’s a ladies hand, but it has spots like a leopard.

 

 

 

See a slideshow of Mattia Bonetti's "Indoor/Outdoor" at Paul Kasmin Gallery here

Jean Nouvel

Jean Nouvel, ante el proyecto del Louvre Abu Dhabi. / thomas coex (afp)


The Louvre Abu Dhabi is ready, two and a half years after its inauguration, to show the world the backbone of its permanent collection. In total, 130 objects from different places over the last four millennia in the exhibition Birth of a museum, which opens to the public on day 22 in the Saadiyat Island cultural district in Abu Dhabi. It is the first large-scale museum ambitious funds, the first with universal vocation of the Arab world and whose construction is based on a project by architect Jean Nouvel.

"The goal is to demonstrate the concept of universality making art objects dialogue of civilizations and eras," said Celine Hullo-Pouyat yesterday, director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi project during a previous visit to the exhibition. It is also, as stated during the presentation Emirati co-director, Hissa to Dhaheri, to "emphasize human values ​​that unite us."

Hence, the sample is divided by civilizations and historical periods, but according to anthropological concepts. This statement of intent is apparent from the first room, which is dedicated to the representation of the human figure, a taboo for some radical interpretations of Islam. In it, the Conservatives opposed the sculpture of a Bactrian princess from the late third millennium BC (one of the jewels of the collection) and a Cypriot prehistoric idol with an abstract painting by Yves Klein. The effect is amazing and encourages reflection of the visitor. To help her, also have been placed screens on which video can be put into context mute that works and pieces linked to other museums.

"The mediation effort is part of the museum's educational objective," says Hullo-Pouyat. Like the rest of the exhibitions organized in Saadiyat, Birth of a museum will be accompanied by lectures, discussions and workshops. In addition, the Louvre Abu Dhabi seeks to establish permanent links with schools in the country and become an instrument of educational support.

The exhibition is divided into six trans-chronological rooms although not a literal illustration of the future museum itself evoke their aesthetic and narrative. In the dedicated to the Ancient World, The speaker, a Roman toga first century marble, is presented alongside a pedestrian statue of a Buddha, a piece dated between the second and third centuries. It is interesting to compare the similarities and differences in the folds of their cloaks or expression. A map explaining what was happening in the rest of the world at that time. Entitled The Sacred In a Jewish Pentateuch shares from Yemen cabinet with a diptych Christian and a Koran.

Later, the eastern Image contrasts with the western look, showing a score of paintings by some of the great European artists ranging from Murillo or Jordaens to Gauguin and Picasso. The presence in these works of Venus and nymphs in the bathroom, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, whose protagonists are scantily clad, forced ago asking if conservatives found with red lines or warnings to local cultural sensitivity.

"No," he replies without hesitation Hullo-Pouyat. "We worked on a universal concept in the context of cultural and scientific program of the museum". Neither she nor the other makers reveal the total number of pieces in the collection or its value. And also refer to this program as a reference framework for the purchase of works by the Government of Abu Dhabi, the owner of both the museum and its contents. Having decided on the target must be aware of the parts that go on sale.

"This is the challenge facing all new museums because they can only access what is available in the market against centuries collections" admits Olivier Gabet, deputy conservation French Museums Agency, whose collaboration is the result of a bilateral agreement between Paris and Abu Dhabi. Gabet highlights the "exclusivity" not only of the works presented but how to present them.

For now, when it opens in late 2015, the museum also displays the permanent collection, funds borrowed from French museums. "As you increase the collection, loans will be reduced," explains the director. The organizers will be very attentive to how local audiences reacted to this exhibition, since the ultimate goal is that the museum will attract local and regional audiences, and that they get to call their own.

The announcement that the Emirate of Abu Dhabi signed an agreement with the Louvre to help him to develop his own art gallery and planned to build the largest Guggenheim in the world was met with skepticism when it was announced in early 2007. Three years after the financial crisis forced the makers to curb its ambitions. Only recently, work has resumed. Under the new timetable announced this year, the Louvre will open in two years, the National Museum signing Foster & Partners will be ready in 2016 and the Guggenheim, designed as one would expect by Frank Gehry opened in 2017. It also plans to build an auditorium designed by architect Zaha Hadid and a maritime museum by Tadao Ando draft.